No you won't die at the hands of demons after using a ouija board

It's a lesson as succinct as the sex-ed class in Mean Girls - don't use ouija board; you will get possessed and die.

For those of you who didn't have a big sister who was obsessed with The Craft growing up, the ouija board is said to be a means to communicate with dead spirits. A bunch of people gather around it, each place a finger on a pointer and then some dead guy moves that pointer around to spell out words.

But scientists say this is some BS.

They've put the ouija board’s magic down to the ideomotor effect, which basically describes a movement that occurs when you've got a specific idea on your brain.

It's the same kind of thing that gives you away when you're telling a lie or makes you scratch your nose when you feel an itch: you rarely think, "I should scratch that" – you just automatically do it.

They're involuntary movements we may not even realise we're doing and it can be pretty helpful. It's our subconscious taking care of the boring stuff like blinking so our brains can spend more time thinking about the Kardashians – or whatever.

The same principles apply when you've got your finger on the ouija pointer and you're thinking of a question. You're focused on the answer and may actually start pushing the pointer to spell it out without knowing you are.

But the thing about ouija boards is that people believe they aren't moving the pointer, which makes them less likely to connect what their hands are doing to the spooky movements on the board. So, if you've a believer to begin with, you're more likely to believe what you're seeing is a demon spelling game.

This effect was capitalised on by a guy called Charles Kennard, who actually marketed the board as a commercial game – like it was Guess Who or something.

It was all off the back of the rise of spiritualism, which is the belief that the spirits of the dead remain and can communicate with the living. It ascended to popularity in the late 1840s after US woman Kate Fox claimed she was able to hear knocks in her house from dead souls, and got them to communicate by returning the knocks. From there, it went bananas. Mediums started popping up everywhere, claiming to be able to speak with the dead.

With this mass gullibility provided opportunity for mass profit, and it was only a matter of time before someone pounced on it.

The ouija board as we know it – with the alphabet, a "yes" and "no" option, and a "goodbye" – came about in 1891. A team of five guys, led by Kennard, came up with the board and marketed it like a common board game. His team of investors, including an attorney called Elijah Bond, sought to patent the game. But the thing about getting a patent for something is that you have to prove that it works.

Bond lodged the paperwork in Washington, where chief patent officer challenged the board to spell out his name – which was supposedly unknown to Bond and his companion. And hey presto, "the board" was able to spell out his name.

It's been suggested by the Smithsonian that Bond, as a patent attorney, may have simply known the bloke's name but, again, that's pretty unlikely – I mean this was before the time of LinkedIn, right?

Oh and the name "ouija"? It apparently doesn't come from the French word "oui" and the German word "ja", both meaning "yes". It came from the board's creators simply asking the board what it wanted to be named. Duh.